Winter Games and Super Bowl offer health takeaways, too

The Winter Olympic Games and the Super Bowl can offer fans not just exciting sports spectacles but also important health insights and information— everything from the risks of viruses and the value of hand washing to the dangers of head blows and why Americans may be slowly changing their minds about how they feel about violent recreations.

As in dealing with all health contagions, it’s also important for all involved to wash their hands, carefully and often, and to contain sneezes, coughs, and other means by which the illness spreads. (Try to avoid thinking about norovirus and “projectile vomiting.”) With so many fans, athletes, officials, and Olympic workers gathered in one spot, it may be a challenge to contain this norovirus outbreak.

Here’s hoping, too, that untold numbers of U.S. sports fans will watch a lot more of the Games because they wisely have chosen to stay home because they’re sick with the flu, the seasonal illness that’s sweeping the country.

As the Washington Post reported:

This flu season is turning out to be so intense that the number of people seeking care at doctors’ offices and emergency rooms has surged to levels not reported since the peak of the 2009 swine flu pandemic. … Another 10 children died in the week ending Feb. 2, bringing the total number of child deaths since this flu season began to at least 63. This is the number of reported deaths and likely does not include all children who have died. States are not required to report adult flu deaths. Flu activity is still widespread … Overall hospitalizations [see graph at top] are also now significantly higher than what officials have normally seen this time of year since the CDC began using this tracking system in 2010… In particular, officials are seeing unusually high levels of hospitalizations in non-elderly adults, with the rates for 50-to-64-year-olds significantly higher than what they were at the same period in the severe 2014-2015 season with the same predominant flu strain. The latest weekly report shows 1 out of every 13 doctor visits last week was for fever [see chart above], cough and other symptoms of the flu, matching the peak levels during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It was higher than any other seasonal flu season since 2003, when officials changed the way flu is tracked.

With most cases of both the flu and norovirus, doctors offer the same counsel: Stay at home (repeat that advice a couple of times), get rest, take in lots of liquids, and if fever and aches and pains are a problem, try over the counter remedies like aspirin.

But the respected NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in January also found that “the game of football itself facing some real questions coming into 2018 … The number of people following the NFL closely and the number who want their children to play football is declining. Overall, the poll found, the number of people who say they follow the NFL has declined sharply since 2014.”

Fans, the pollsters said, are expressing increasing wariness as to football’s role in contributing to head injuries, especially concussions, that can result in lifetime damage.

As NBC News reported of the poll data:

Overall, 48 percent of those polled in January said they would encourage their child to play a sport other than football out of concussion concerns. Four years ago, only 40 percent said they would do that. That’s an 8-point shift in four years. Among mothers, 53 percent said they would encourage their child to play another sport; that was up from 40 percent in 2014 – and increase of 13 points. With fathers, 39 percent said they would encourage their child to play another sport; that was up from 33 percent in 2014 – a 6-point bump. In other words, fewer adults are watching the game on Sundays and fewer are encouraging their children to take the field.

All parents want their children to be happy, socially well adjusted, and to enjoy their health in fun and games. But we also need to learn lessons from athletics, especially in protecting the young from infection and injury, especially head harms.

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